


the audience gazes also into you

by arbitrarily



Category: Homeland
Genre: Episode Tag, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-29
Updated: 2012-12-29
Packaged: 2017-11-22 20:25:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/613974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Don't trust him, that's all I'm saying."</i> Post 2x07.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the audience gazes also into you

**Author's Note:**

> Written to follow immediately after the events in 2x07; may not match precisely with subsequent canon events.

 

 

 

 **1.**  
  
Carrie drives from the police station back to Quinn.   
  
When she turns her right blinker on she turns her CD player off, a quick jab of her finger, and she breathes in deep. She grips the wheel tight as she turns and she drives.  
  
She drives, and in her head she makes a list of things she knows. She makes a list and her breathing slows, her grip loosens.   
  
She knows, for instance, the route back to the safe house. She knows the route to Langley. She knows she could drive the route from her house to Langley more asleep than awake, and she knows that in the past she has done exactly that.   
  
She knows that the disc in her car’s CD player is Miles Davis and that it has six tracks. She had been listening to track number three, “Black Comedy,” when she had turned it off. She knows that in 1988 trombonist JJ Johnson said when interviewed, “Jazz is restless. It won’t stay put and it never will.” She knows what that means, too. She know that’s why when played jazz music can sound painful to the right (or the wrong) listener, to those who don’t like what it means to be restless.   
  
She brakes hard as the light changes from yellow to red.  
  
 Carrie knows what it means to be restless.  
  
She rolls down the window a crack and then she rolls it back up. Rolls it down again. She’s sweating and the sun is setting. Her entire car is filled with orange. Orange and not yellow, fallow yellow, fallow yellow, sometimes she looks at Brody and that’s all she sees: yellow, fallow yellow, the way the light broke through the tops of the trees -- first at the cabin, and then yesterday in the clearing -- and all she saw was yellow.   
  
The light changes to green and she guns it.  
  
She knows Galvez is dying and Quinn was gut shot (when she sees Quinn she sees green, a cold blue-green, the sort of green that belongs drowned underwater). She knows Saul is grieving and that he has been for the better part of the last year. She knows -- fuck, she  _knows_  -- now, with an acknowledged and accepted certainty and conviction that sneaks up and excites her, sparks a live wire down her spine at random, that she was right: Brody is (was, is, was, the tense matters and the tense is a thing she still does not know) working for Abu Nazir in a plot against the United States.  
  
Brody is a traitor.   
  
She lets the car idle before pulling the keys from the ignition. The sun dips down below the buildings that sketch out the horizon line and the yellow, the orange, the warmth departs with it.  
  
Brody is a traitor. She pockets her keys. She thinks she knows that.

 

  
  
  
 **2.**  
  
Quinn is rattling a bottle of pills when she walks in, shuts the door behind her.   
  
He swallows two, his eyes never leaving her.  
  
“You look like shit,” she says. She throws her bag down and shuffles over to him. He’s perched on the table next to the monitors and she drops down into the chair next to him.  
  
“I was shot,” he says dryly. Carrie doesn’t say anything, but she does look pointedly at the bottle of pills still in his hand. He ignores her, nods towards the screens. “Looks like you talked Captain America and spawn out of narcing, huh.”  
  
Carrie doesn’t say anything to that either. She watches Brody and Dana on the middle monitor, watches them walk through the front door of their house, neither speaking, something dehumanizing about the detached black-and-white delivery of them on the screen.  
  
“He was angry,” she says to the pixelated Brody in front of her. Her eyes dart to the monitor to the left as Brody enters the kitchen. He takes a beer from the fridge, drains half of it before sighing heavily. Offscreen a door slams shut: Dana. “He’s feeling . . . used,” she says. Brody puts the bottle down on the counter, sighs again and rubs at the back of his neck. His cell phone rings: Jessica.  
  
Quinn snorts, slides down off the table and into the chair beside her. His mouth pulls tight, downturned, all but saying  _fuck if I care_. But he sighs too, the sound as present and exhausted as Brody's had been. They listen to Brody as he talks to Jessica, as he tells her they are home, that she should come home. “It could be the extra hole in my body talking,” Quinn says quietly but not without venom, “or the stitches I probably pulled earlier today, or the six fucking bodies we left in Gettysburg, but I’m really not feeling all that charitable about how used Sergeant fucking Brody might be feeling today, yesterday, or tomorrow.”  
  
Carrie cocks her head toward Quinn, her eyes still drifting out of habit back to Brody.  
  
“Besides. I thought you were supposed to cede some masculine empowerment his way.” His mouth quirks up. “He couldn’t get it up?”  
  
“Fuck you,” she drawls.   
  
He laughs and then presses a hand low on his abdomen. “That is your racket, isn’t it.”  
  
Carrie feels her mouth go soft, not yet a frown, but threatening. She shakes her head slightly, barely imperceptible.   
  
“Fucking to get what you want,” he says, and it comes out almost sing-songy.   
  
 “Yeah, yeah,” Brody says and his voice fills the room. “Love you too, yeah,” and Quinn is watching the line of Carrie’s throat, down to where her skin disappears into the collar of her blouse.   
  
“Everything will be okay,” he lies. And then he hangs up the phone.

 

  
  
  
  
 **3.**  
  
Quinn kisses the way she expected he would: like a fast knife through her.  
  
The fluorescent lights above cast everything as a harsh shade of green. Around them, Brody and Jessica fight -- loud, banal, domestic. Quinn’s mouth is none of those things against her own. She takes it like a challenge, a test, like he’s trying to wring something out of her, prove something, if only to himself.   
  
“I don’t know what you want from me, Jessica,” Brody’s voice says and Carrie shivers into Quinn.   
  
Brody might as well be there, in the room with him. His scars pressing against her back, his hand trying to reach between the two of them. Hiss in her ear, “Is this for real?” and she won’t know if he means himself or Quinn.  
  
“I have rules about this sort of shit,” Quinn tells her, but he says it with his lips brushing against hers, his tongue wetting her bottom lip. He does not look to the monitors beside them, Brody rendered monochromatic, imagined like a ghost.  
  
Carrie arches an eyebrow, playing for aloof even though her breathing is already labored and uneven. Even though she has a hand twisted under the back of his shirt, liking the way his breath stutters each time she brushes low against the bandage there.  
  
“I know you don’t,” he says, and he looks like he wants to smile, but if he did, it would be a sad smile. They both can’t be sad when they smile, so Carrie makes her mouth twist mean.  
  
“Good for you. You have the moral upper-hand.” His mouth twists too, alone and then with hers, and she was wrong.  
  
She was wrong about the sad smile. Or maybe she had been right and the sadness had only lasted for that singular meter before, the length of time it took for him to recognize her, situate her into his own worldview. His mouth is mirroring hers now, tight and cruel and smart, and perhaps they are playing at a rhythm on delay here, a syncopated beat. He might have the upper-hand but he is following her lead.  
  
“I’ve given you the truth,” Brody says. “I don’t know what more you want from me.”  
  
Quinn bites her bottom lip and she gasps.  
  
“You know,” she says, and she thinks she is marginally disappointed and also relieved: she couldn’t taste the pills in his mouth, couldn’t chase that chalky texture she expected to find when his tongue first slid alongside her own. She couldn’t taste blood. “I don’t trust you either.”  
  
He doesn’t ask  _either?_  and she’s glad for it; that would have served too strong a disappointment.  
  
“Look at that,” he breathes instead along her jawline, tipping his face up to meet her eye, his pupils blown. “You’re getting wiser.”  
  
She notes that he does not say smarter.  
  
On the monitor, Brody turns out the bedroom light. When she tastes blood, it is her own.  
  
  
  
F I N .  


 


End file.
